Structural computation of alignments of business processes over partial orders

Relating event data and process models is becoming an important element for organizations. This paper presents a novel approach for aligning traces and process models. The approach is based on the structural theory of Petri nets (the marking equation), applied over an unfolding of the initial process model. Given an observed trace, the approach adopts an iterative optimization mechanism on top of the unfolding, computing at each iteration part of the resulting alignment. In contrast to the previous work that is primarily grounded in the marking equation, this approach is guaranteed to provide real solutions, and tries to mimic as much as possible the events observed in the trace. Experiments witness the significance of this approach both in quality and execution time perspectives.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft